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1/ With a couple of exceptions, my friend Jack doesn’t much engage with @benjaminwittes’s and @charlie_savage’s detailed accounts of how Barr repeatedly misled and distorted the Report, in his letters and testimony. Having said that, I should add that I think the focus, ...
2/ ... by pundits & members of Congress, on whether and to what extent Barr outright lied (he's clever, and careful to avoid it most of the time) or “merely” painted a very dishonest picture, is fundamentally misguided and a diversion from the much more serious crisis,
3/ just as the focus on whether Trump satisfied the elements of 1512 is an unfortunate and short-sighted diversion from the more important matters of Trump’s repeated violations of his oath; his incessant efforts from Day One of his term to undermine our system of justice &
4/ the most important counterintelligence investigation of our time; and the pressing question of whether and why he continues to be far more interested in kowtowing to Putin than he is to stopping Russian interference with our electoral system. ...
5/ The shocking thing is not what Barr said, or how he misled--after all, Jack's right that we can all now read the Report for ourselves--but what Barr *didn’t* say, or even hint at: The Attorney General of the United States is, from all that appears, entirely indifferent ...
6/ ... to what Ben rightly calls the “grotesque abuses of power” described on virtually every page of the Mueller Report, almost all of which involve efforts to corrupt, for personal ends, the processes and substance of investigations undertaken ...
7/ ... by our very best public servants *in the very department Barr runs.* Any AG seriously devoted to DOJ and the nation wouldn't stand for it. Barr, however, shrugs. I don't think Barr is ignoring this crisis & dissembling about the report in order to curry favor w/Trump. ...
8/ Rather, he appears to be doing it because he's genuinely all-in on the counternarrative that consumes almost all of the GOP, namely: that what Trump did was no big deal—perhaps even business/politics as usual, and entirely understandable in light of the forces ...
9/ ... arrayed to bring him to heel; that we should be more concerned about Peter Strzok than with Trump’s abuses of office; that Mueller and his team, for whom Barr displayed manifest contempt (they’re not the “best & brightest”—merely “competent” is the most he’ll concede) ...
10/ ... were officious at best (“snitty”) and perhaps even ill-motivated (or out of their lane at a minimum); and that the FBI’s/Mueller’s investigations were part of an effort to “us[e] the criminal justice process as a political weapon.” ...
11/ I'm fairly sure Jack rejects this counternarrative and is himself deeply concerned about the way Trump has abused his office and countless norms. So shouldn't Jack, and all of us, ...
12/ ... be deeply disturbed that the steward of the Justice Department & FBI appears not to care in the slightest?
@just_security @lawfareblog
@just_security @lawfareblog
